A member of the traditional media may have finally crossed the Rubicon. On last Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews began to leap where mainstream journalists fear to tread, introducing a topic that is long overdue in our national discourse: accountability for the war crimes that launched the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. War crimes now confirmed by the Pentagon itself.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: It‘s official. Saddam was not allied with al Qaeda. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It had no nuclear program. But who is going to pay for the propaganda that got us into Iraq?
Let‘s play HARDBALL...
Tweety's guest was retired CIA operative, and author, Robert Baer. Throughout the interview, Matthews seemed to be laying out a case as if he were a prosecutor before a grand jury (or impeachment inquiry). He starts with a clip of Cheney speaking to Rush Limbaugh earlier that same day:
CHENEY: Remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate, ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda, then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad...
Cheney continues with this old lie, the primal Saddam/al Qaeda connection untruth. The mind reels at the audacity of Cheney's willingness to repeat this ancient, long-disproved falsehood. But there it is. But here's where Chris takes his first shot, backed by the evidence provided in the Pentagon report:
MATTHEWS: Those are the talking points of Scooter Libby. Scooter Libby wrote those talking points before he left, and they were given to him by Doug Feith. And now the vice president reads them as if they‘re the truth today. Are they true, what he was saying?
ROBERT BAER, FORMER CIA OPERATIVE: Oh, absolutely not. You know, I don‘t know what these guys are on.
Seeing it laid out like that on a very mainstream news program, it's clear why Cheney went out of his way to tell that lie again on Friday. He feels threatened by the Pentagon report. And afraid of the obvious conclusions that middle America may finally be drawing.
Matthews and Baer quickly dispatch another one of Cheney's all-time greats -- the fictional meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta and an emissary of Saddam Hussein:
BAER: You know, and the famous Atta-Ani (ph) meeting in Prague where...
MATTHEWS: Never happened.
BAER: Never happened. The FBI and the CIA said categorically it never happened. Yet they continued to run with this story, convince 70-some percent of Americans Saddam—it‘s a lie. This is—this is truly the big lie.
Finally, Matthews dives into the heart of the matter:
MATTHEWS: Let‘s talk about how this happened. We went to war for a lot of reasons. I mean, I don‘t think we‘ll ever get to the bottom of it for 10 or 20 years, but the president wanted to go. The vice president wanted to go. The intellectuals wanted to go, the neocons, so-called. They all wanted to go for all different reasons. But they made the case we were going to go with the American middle, which (INAUDIBLE) for this war, by saying there was a nuclear threat. Then they suggested this kind of amorphous connection to 9/11 that somehow—remember the country music—remember how you felt—and all that? It was a—it was a continuous drumbeat of the way to get even for what happened to us in New York and in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon was to go hit them hard in Iraq, that somehow—you know what I mean? They did it over and over for almost two years there. What do we do with that kind of propaganda efforts...
Yes, what does a nation do when it discovers that its leaders intentionally lied it into war? Many of us have known about these lies almost since they were told. But what happens when the tipping point is reached, when most Americans understand how they have been deceived?
BAER: It was total propaganda. They went to the CIA. They went to the Pentagon, to Doug Feith, and said, Give us talking points so we can go to war. And that‘s when Tenet‘s "slam dunk" came in. He says, yes, we can sell this case to the American people. But the Middle East is complicated, and that‘s why they got away with it. [...]
MATTHEWS: Who wanted the bad intel? Who said, Give me that...
BAER: Cheney did. He goes to the Situation Room and said, We know Saddam‘s a bad guy. Give me stuff. And they...
MATTHEWS: Give me a case.
BAER: They bring in what they could and they—this isn‘t good enough. I can‘t sell a war on this. I want everything. And then he cherry-picked this—this trash. This intelligence was trash on Saddam...
MATTHEWS: Well, who wrote the Colin Powell statement to the U.N.?
Who put that together?
BAER: The CIA did. But the CIA...
MATTHEWS: Why? If they didn‘t believe it, why‘d they do it?
BAER: Because they were ordered to. They dipped into the tangential intelligence which was unconfirmed, and they said, If you really want it, here it is. We don‘t trust it. These are my—I know these guys. They‘re all my colleagues.
With the evidence laid out, Matthews drops the hammer:
MATTHEWS: You know, fighting an aggressive war is a war crime. Objectively. You can‘t just fight a war because you don‘t like another country. You have to have some reason for it...
BAER: Chris...
MATTHEWS: ... some self-defense reason.
BAER: The crime hasn‘t even...
MATTHEWS: Did we fight a war just for aggressive reasons? Or was there a self-defense aspect...
(CROSSTALK)
BAER: We fought a war on a lie. And that‘s the important issue, on a lie.
MATTHEWS: Whose?
BAER: The administration‘s, the White House‘s. It was not the CIA‘s.
It was not the Pentagon‘s. This stuff was ordered top-down.
Some figured it out faster than others. But the mainstream media and the American people have finally arrived on the scene of the crime. The only question remaining is how and when the political-will manifests for holding our war criminals accountable.
Tweety can finally see the big picture. Can the rest of America be far behind?